Studio Profile: Bläck Studio | Conan Exiles Cinematic VFX Breakdown

Stockholm-based Production, Visual Effects and Animation studio - Bläck is part of The Goodbye Kansas Entertainment Group with sister companies Fido & Imagination Studios. They provide VFX, CGI, motion capture and animation for film, TV, commercials, advertising, computer games development and marketing. Bläck's diverse and unique structure creates a highly efficient workflow allowing them to utilize the different strengths of each and every artist and department.

When we approach​ a new project the first step lands in the laps of our in­house directors and art directors. They visualize an idea, script and concept that resonates with the clients wishes and goals. Always working closely together with the client, we ensure a very personal touch creating an open and versatile relationship with our clients. Coming into production the core team and department leads start off with a detailed briefing of each and every aspect of the trailer. Our goal is to determine the most efficient way to create the high­end visuals, often to a very tight timeline and delivery date. As for our and Funcoms work on the Conan trailer, here’s an overview of our processes.

“When Funcom contacted us for help with their new game Conan Exiles, my goal as a director was to create a trailer that captures the soul and essence of Conan. Capturing the core of the Conan comics and bring him and the world to life. A raw world with blood, sweat, pain, suffering and testosterone. A homage to the origins of Conan, but with an updated modern touch. Teasing the audience and hopefully hyping to the game.

” Said In­house director Fredrik Löfberg

Creating Conan the Barbarian! We started off by discussing what type of Conan we saw in front of us, the first thing that came to mind was Frank Frazetta, his works on Conan was something we really wanted to pull inspiration from. From that we started to put together a reference sheet of different images that depict the various aspects of how we wanted the character to look.

Moving on from that our lead character artist Jonas Skoog began with designing and sculpting a 3d concept, this helped us determine his length, muscular build, hair and overall look. Here are some key notes of his Creation. Working in zBrush, Jonas went into meticulous detail sculpting every tiny wrinkle, scar, vein­pop, you name it. The level of detail needs to be perfect down to the smallest peach fuzz. Simultaneously our lead animator Jonas Ekman starts the previs process in tight conjunction with director Fredrik Löfberg and art director Gustaf Holmsten, laying out the cameras, angles, movement, tweaking the shot lengths and intensity and so on. As the cameras angles got set, Gustaf took screengrabs from the animation playblast and created concept art paint overs of the images. This helps us immensely to explore the color scheme, lighting, environment building and so on. When the previs is locked we begin with our fine animation which often begins with a journey to Imagination Studios, motion capture studio, which is located in Uppsala, just north of Stockholm. Working with different talents, such as actors and actresses, stuntmen and women, we always come out with a high­level full body and face performance. As Conan starts to come together our vfx supervisor & lead lighting artist Henrik Eklundh & Jonas Skoog continue to shade Conan making sure the skin, eyes, hair really come alive and become a true digital human. Furthermore Henrik begins to light Conan in the different shots. Lead Compositors Calle Granström & Peter Blomstrand begin working on the shots as the first renders start to come out, working through what elements are needed, such as, sand storm effects, blood etc. Calle also handled the matte­painting elements, to help bring depth and complete theframing of the shot. Color grading is the final piece of the puzzle. ​ This is the process oftweaking and enhancing the color & contrast of a an image. Here we make sure that the trailer line­up and come together as a coherent movie. We also add the final touches to the look and feel.​ Workflow & Pipeline

● Maya for animation, cloth, hair, scene assembly and render setup
● Houdini for FX heavy lifting
● zBrush, Mari and Marvelous Designer for character creation
● Nuke for compositing
● Rendering in Vray
● Ftrack is used to handle assets and shot tracking, feedback and team communication
● Proprietary tools and plugins to extend our off the shelf softwares and integration / bridging between them and also uses Alembic workflow